<
https://slate.com/business/2025/06/donald-trump-immigration-ice-raids-arrests-jena-louisiana.html>
"Jena, Louisiana, population 4,000, would like to be known for its youth. Its
youth softball team, specifically. Football is important too: This is the
South, after all, and Jena High School put a player into the NFL not that long
ago. But the first road sign on the two-lane highway announcing your arrival in
the town name-checks only the Lady Giants, the 2021 state champions.
By mid-March of this year, the varsity Jena Lady Giants had hopes of another
state title in view. The team did nothing but win that week, mostly blowouts:
11–1, 15–1. On March 13, it went on the road and won 12–2.
That same afternoon, back in Jena, a crowd filled up the local theater, the
Strand. Attendees were there not for softball but for another institution that
defines the town. Inside was the first community relations luncheon of the year
with the GEO Group, the nation’s largest operator of private prisons.
To get to the event, cars came up through Jena’s main thoroughfare, Oak Street,
a nod to the city’s once great timber industry. They passed a McDonald’s on one
side and a Dollar General on the other. They passed many American flags, draped
outside businesses on both sides of the street, and pulled up to the
intersection with the theater, which was marked by a road sign with a quote
from the Bible:
Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and YOU SHALL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.
Up the road just 3 miles farther, past Jena High School and out into the woods,
they would have come upon the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, run by
the GEO Group. It is the ninth-largest immigration detention center in the
country, and about 1,180 men are held there on any given day.
But this afternoon, as it did once every three months, GEO was coming down to
them. The mood in the Strand was light, positive. These meetings tended to be.
The townspeople, mostly parish leaders and local businesspeople, sat down for
lunch, which was catered and free.
GEO was no stranger to Jena, and Jena no stranger to GEO. They’d been partners
for years, back before the Jena facility had been retrofitted for immigrant
detention, back before GEO was even called GEO. Now the facility was one of the
largest employers in the area: 250 jobs. It was also one of the region’s
biggest taxpayers.
The remote facility had grown into a central node in a newly established
network of immigrant detention centers that span central Louisiana. Immigration
advocates refer to this region as “the black hole,” a place where people
disappear into overcrowded detention, sometimes for years, often without ever
seeing a lawyer or being convicted of a crime. Others are whisked onto
deportation flights, headed for countries they’ve fled or never been to. One
place where people who have been brought to Jena rarely end up is back at their
American homes, in the lives they were living before agents banged on their
front doors or raided their workplaces or pulled them over for a traffic stop."
Via
Garbage Day: Emotionally psyopping yourself with AI
<
https://www.garbageday.email/p/emotionally-psyopping-yourself-with-ai-34a110e9aa778e07>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics